FROM THE UNPUBLISHED "ALLEGORIES OF THE HEART"

"HERE
HE COMES!" shouted the boys along the
street.--"Here comes
the man with a snake in his bosom!"

This outcry,
saluting Herkimer's ears, as he was about to enter the
iron gate of the Elliston mansion, made him pause. It was not
without a shudder that he found himself on the point of meeting his
former acquaintance, whom he had known in the glory of youth, and whom
now, after an interval of five years, he was to find the victim either
of a diseased fancy, or a horrible physical misfortune.

"A snake
in his bosom!" repeated the young sculptor to himself. "It
must be he. No second man on earth has such a bosom-friend! And now,
my poor Rosina, Heaven grant me wisdom to discharge my errand
aright! Woman's faith must be strong indeed, since thine has not yet
failed."

Thus musing,
he took his stand at the entrance of the gate, and
waited until the personage, so singularly announced, should make his
appearance. After an instant or two, he beheld the figure of a lean
man, of unwholesome look, with glittering eyes and long black hair,
who seemed to imitate
the motion of a snake; for, instead of walking
straight forward with open front, he undulated along the pavement in a
curved line. It may be too fanciful to say, that something, either
in his moral or material aspect, suggested the idea that a miracle had
been wrought, by transforming a serpent into a man; but so
imperfectly, that the snaky nature was yet hidden, and scarcely
hidden, under the mere outward guise of humanity. Herkimer remarked
that his complexion had a greenish tinge over its sickly white,
reminding him of a species of marble out of which he had once
wrought a head of Envy, with her snaky locks.

The wretched
being approached the gate, but, instead of entering,
stopt short, and fixed the glitter of his eye full upon the
compassionate, yet steady countenance of the sculptor.

And then
there was an audible hiss, but whether it came from the
apparent lunatic's own lips, or was the real hiss of a serpent,
might admit of discussion. At all events, it made Herkimer shudder
to his heart's core.

Herkimer did
know him. But it demanded all the intimate and
practical acquaintance with the human face, acquired by modelling
actual likenesses in clay, to recognize the features of Roderick
Elliston in the visage that now met the sculptor's gaze. Yet it was
he. It added nothing to the wonder, to reflect that the once brilliant
young man had undergone this odious and fearful change, during the
no more than five brief years of Herkimer's abode at Florence. The
possibility of such a transformation being granted, it was as easy
to conceive it effected in a moment as in an age. Inexpressibly
shocked and startled, it was still the keenest pang, when Herkimer
remembered that the fate of his cousin
Rosina, the ideal of gentle
womanhood, was indissolubly interwoven with that of a being whom
Providence seemed to have unhumanized.

"Elliston! Roderick!"
cried he, "I had heard of this; but my
conception came far short of the truth. What has befallen you? Why
do I find you thus?"

"Oh, 'tis
a mere nothing! A snake! A snake! The commonest thing
in the world. A snake in the bosom--that's all," answered Roderick
Elliston. "But how is your own breast?" continued he, looking the
sculptor in the eye, with the most acute and penetrating glance that
it had ever been his fortune to encounter. "All pure and wholesome? No
reptile there? By my faith and conscience, and by the devil within me,
here is a wonder! A man without a serpent in his bosom!"

"Be calm,
Elliston," whispered George Herkimer, laying his hand
upon the shoulder of the snake-possessed. "I have crossed the ocean to
meet you. Listen--let us be private--I bring a message from Rosina!--from
your wife!"

With this
exclamation, the most frequent in his mouth, the
unfortunate man clutched both hands upon his breast, as if an
intolerable sting or torture impelled him to rend it open, and let out
the living mischief, even where it intertwined with his own life. He
then freed himself from Herkimer's grasp, by a subtle motion, and
gliding through the gate, took refuge in his antiquated family
residence. The sculptor did not pursue him. He saw that no available
intercourse could be expected at such a moment, and was desirous,
before another meeting, to inquire closely into the nature of
Roderick's disease, and the circumstances that had reduced him to so
lamentable a condition. He succeeded in obtaining the necessary
information from an eminent medical gentleman.

Shortly after
Elliston's separation from his wife--now nearly
four years ago--his associates had observed a singular
gloom spreading
over his daily life, like those chill, gray mists that sometimes steal
away the sunshine from a summer's morning. The symptoms caused them
endless perplexity. They knew not whether ill health were robbing
his spirits of elasticity; or whether a canker of the mind was
gradually eating, as such cankers do, from his moral system into the
physical frame, which is but the shadow of the former. They looked for
the root of this trouble in his shattered schemes of domestic
bliss--wilfully shattered by himself--but could not be satisfied of its
existence there. Some thought that their once brilliant friend was
in an incipient stage of insanity, of which his passionate impulses
had perhaps been the forerunners; others prognosticated a general
blight and gradual decline. From Roderick's own lips, they could learn
nothing. More than once, it is true, he had been heard to say,
clutching his hands convulsively upon his breast--"It gnaws me! It
gnaws me!"--but, by different auditors, a great diversity of
explanation was assigned to this ominous expression. What could it be,
that gnawed the breast of Roderick Elliston? Was it sorrow? Was it
merely the tooth of physical disease? Or, in his reckless course,
often verging upon profligacy, if not plunging into its depths, had he
been guilty of some deed, which made his bosom a prey to the
deadlier fangs of remorse? There was plausible ground for each of
these conjectures; but it must not be concealed that more than one
elderly gentleman, the victim of good cheer and slothful habits,
magisterially pronounced the secret of the whole matter to be
Dyspepsia!

Meanwhile, Roderick
seemed aware how generally he had become the
subject of curiosity and conjecture, and, with a morbid repugnance
to such notice, or to any notice whatsoever, estranged himself from
all companionship. Not merely the eye of man was a horror to him;
not merely the light of a friend's countenance; but even the blessed
sunshine, likewise, which, in its universal beneficence, typifies
the radiance
of the Creator's face, expressing his love for all the
creatures of his hand. The dusky twilight was now too transparent
for Roderick Elliston; the blackest midnight was his chosen hour to
steal abroad; and if ever he were seen, it was when the watchman's
lantern gleamed upon his figure, gliding along the street with his
hands clutched upon his bosom, still muttering:--"It gnaws me! It
gnaws me!" What could it be that gnawed him?

After a
time, it became known that Elliston was in the habit of
resorting to all the noted quacks that infested the city, or whom
money would tempt to journey thither from a distance. By one of
these persons, in the exultation of a supposed cure, it was proclaimed
far and wide, by dint of hand-bills and little pamphlets on dingy
paper, that a distinguished gentleman, Roderick Elliston, Esq., had
been relieved of a SNAKE in his stomach! So here was the monstrous
secret, ejected from its lurking-place into public view, in all its
horrible deformity. The mystery was out; but not so the bosom serpent.
He, if it were anything but a delusion, still lay coiled in his living
den. The empiric's cure had been a sham, the effect it was supposed,
of some stupefying drug, which more nearly caused the death of the
patient than of the odious reptile that possessed him. When Roderick
Elliston regained entire sensibility, it was to find his misfortune
the town talk--the more than nine days' wonder and horror--while, at
his bosom, he felt the sickening motion of a thing alive, and the
gnawing of that restless fang, which seemed to gratify at once a
physical appetite and a fiendish spite.

He summoned
the old black servant, who had been bred up in his
father's house, and was a middle-aged man while Roderick lay in his
cradle.

"Scipio!" he
began; and then paused, with his arms folded over
his heart. "What do people say of me, Scipio?"

"Sir! my
poor master! that you had a serpent in your bosom,"
answered the servant, with hesitation.

"Nothing else,
dear master," replied Scipio;--"only that the
Doctor gave you a powder, and that the snake leapt out upon the
floor."

"No, no!"
muttered Roderick to himself, as he shook his head, and
pressed his hands with a more convulsive force upon his breast,--"I
feel him still. It gnaws me! It gnaws me!"

From this
time, the miserable sufferer ceased to shun the world,
but rather solicited and forced himself upon the notice of
acquaintances and strangers. It was partly the result of
desperation, on finding that the cavern of his own bosom had not
proved deep and dark enough to hide the secret, even while it was so
secure a fortress for the loathsome fiend that had crept into it.
But still more, this craving for notoriety was a symptom of the
intense morbidness which now pervaded his nature. All persons,
chronically diseased, are egotists, whether the disease be of the mind
or body; whether sin, sorrow, or merely the more tolerable calamity of
some endless pain, or mischief among the cords of mortal life. Such
individuals are made acutely conscious of a self, by the torture in
which it dwells. Self, therefore, grows to be so prominent an object
with them, that they cannot but present it to the face of every casual
passer-by. There is a pleasure--perhaps the greatest of which the
sufferer is susceptible--in displaying the wasted or ulcerated limb,
or the cancer in the breast; and the fouler the crime, with so much
the more difficulty does the perpetrator prevent it from thrusting
up its snake-like head to frighten the world; for it is that cancer,
or that crime, which constitutes their respective individuality.
Roderick Elliston, who, a little while before,
had held himself so
scornfully above the common lot of men, now paid full allegiance to
this humiliating law. The snake in his bosom seemed the symbol of a
monstrous egotism, to which everything was referred, and which he
pampered, night and day, with a continual and exclusive sacrifice of
devil-worship.

He soon
exhibited what most people considered indubitable tokens of
insanity. In some of his moods, strange to say, he prided and
gloried himself on being marked out from the ordinary experience of
mankind, by the possession of a double nature, and a life within a
life. He appeared to imagine that the snake was a divinity--not
celestial, it is true, but darkly infernal--and that he thence derived
an eminence and a sanctity, horrid, indeed, yet more desirable than
whatever ambition aims at. Thus he drew his misery around him like a
regal mantle, and looked down triumphantly upon those whose vitals
nourished no deadly monster. Oftener, however, his human nature
asserted its empire over him, in the shape of a yearning for
fellowship. It grew to be his custom to spend the whole day in
wandering about the streets, aimlessly, unless it might be called an
aim to establish a species of brotherhood between himself and the
world. With cankered ingenuity, he sought out his own disease in every
breast. Whether insane or not, he showed so keen a perception of
frailty, error, and vice, that many persons gave him credit for
being possessed not merely with a serpent, but with an actual fiend,
who imparted this evil faculty of recognizing whatever was ugliest
in man's heart.

For instance,
he met an individual, who, for thirty years, had
cherished a hatred against his own brother. Roderick, amidst the
throng of the street, laid his hand on this man's chest, and looking
full into his forbidding face,

"How is
the snake to-day?"--he inquired, with a mock expression of
sympathy.

"The snake!
The snake! Does he gnaw you?" persisted Roderick.
"Did you take counsel with him this morning, when you should have been
saying your prayers? Did he sting, when you thought of your
brother's health, wealth, and good repute? Did he caper for joy,
when you remembered the profligacy of his only son? And whether he
stung, or whether he frolicked, did you feel his poison throughout
your body and soul, converting everything to sourness and
bitterness? That is the way of such serpents. I have learned the whole
nature of them from my own!"

"Where is
the police?" roared the object of Roderick's persecution,
at the same time giving an instinctive clutch to his breast. "Why is
this lunatic allowed to go at large?"

"Ha, ha!"
chuckled Roderick, releasing his grasp of the man. "His
bosom-serpent has stung him then!"

Often, it
pleased the unfortunate young man to vex people with a
lighter satire, yet still characterized by somewhat of snake-like
virulence. One day he encountered an ambitious statesman, and
gravely inquired after the welfare of his boa constrictor; for of that
species, Roderick affirmed, this gentleman's serpent must needs be,
since its appetite was enormous enough to devour the whole country and
constitution. At another time, he stopped a close-fisted old fellow,
of great wealth, but who skulked about the city in the guise of a
scare-crow, with a patched blue surtout, brown hat, and mouldy
boots, scraping pence together, and picking up rusty nails. Pretending
to look earnestly at this respectable person's stomach, Roderick
assured him that his snake was a copper-head, and had been generated
by the immense quantities of that base metal, with which he daily
defiled his fingers. Again, he assaulted a man of rubicund visage, and
told him that few bosom-serpents had more of the devil in them,
than
those that breed in the vats of a distillery. The next whom Roderick
honored with his attention was a distinguished clergyman, who happened
just then to be engaged in a theological controversy, where human
wrath was more perceptible than divine inspiration.

"Profane wretch!"
exclaimed the divine; but, nevertheless, his hand
stole to his breast.

He met a
person of sickly sensibility, who, on some early
disappointment, had retired from the world, and thereafter held no
intercourse with his fellow-men, but brooded sullenly or
passionately over the irrevocable past. This man's very heart, if
Roderick might be believed, had been changed into a serpent, which
would finally torment both him and itself to death. Observing a
married couple, whose domestic troubles were matter of notoriety, he
condoled with both on having mutually taken a house-adder to their
bosoms. To an envious author, who deprecated works which he could
never equal, he said that his snake was the slimiest and filthiest
of all the reptile tribe, but was fortunately without a sting. A man
of impure life, and a brazen face, asking Roderick if there were any
serpent in his breast, he told him that there was, and of the same
species that once tortured Don Rodrigo, the Goth. He took a fair young
girl by the hand, and gazing sadly into her eyes, warned her that
she cherished a serpent of the deadliest kind within her gentle
breast; and the world found the truth of those ominous words, when,
a few months afterwards, the poor girl died of love and shame. Two
ladies, rivals in fashionable life, who tormented one another with a
thousand little stings of womanish spite, were given to understand,
that each of their hearts was a nest of diminutive snakes, which did
quite as much mischief as one great one.

But nothing
seemed to please Roderick better than to lay hold of
a person infected with jealousy, which he represented
as an enormous
green reptile, with an ice-cold length of body, and the sharpest sting
of any snake save one.

It was
a dark-browed man, who put the question; he had an evasive
eye, which, in the course of a dozen years, had looked no mortal
directly in the face. There was an ambiguity about this person's
character--a stain upon his reputation--yet none could tell
precisely of what nature; although the city-gossips, male and
female, whispered the most atrocious surmises. Until a recent period
he had followed the sea, and was, in fact, the very ship-master whom
George Herkimer had encountered, under such singular circumstances, in
the Grecian Archipelago.

"What bosom-serpent
has the sharpest sting?" repeated this man: but
he put the question as if by a reluctant necessity, and grew pale
while he was uttering it.

"Why need
you ask?" replied Roderick, with a look of dark
intelligence. "Look into your own breast! Hark, my serpent bestirs
himself! He acknowledges the presence of a master-fiend!"

And then,
as the bystanders afterwards affirmed, a hissing sound
was heard, apparently in Roderick Elliston's breast. It was said, too,
that an answering hiss came from the vitals of the shipmaster, as if a
snake were actually lurking there, and had been aroused by the call of
its brother-reptile. If there were in fact any such sound, it might
have been caused by a malicious exercise of ventriloquism, on the part
of Roderick.

Thus, making
his own actual serpent--if a serpent there actually
was in his bosom--the type of each man's fatal error, or hoarded
sin, or unquiet conscience, and striking his sting so unremorsefully
into the sorest spot, we may well imagine that Roderick became the
pest of the city. Nobody could elude him; none could withstand him. He
grappled with the ugliest truth that he could lay his hand on, and
compelled his adversary to do the same. Strange spectacle in human
life, where it is the instinctive effort of one and all to hide
those sad realities, and leave them undisturbed beneath a heap of
superficial topics, which constitute the materials of intercourse
between man and man! It was not to be tolerated that Roderick Elliston
should break through the tacit compact, by which the world has done
its best to secure repose, without relinquishing evil. The victims
of his malicious remarks, it is true, had brothers enough to keep them
in countenance; for, by Roderick's theory, every mortal bosom harbored
either a brood of small serpents, or one overgrown monster, that had
devoured all the rest. Still, the city could not bear this new
apostle. It was demanded by nearly all, and particularly by the most
respectable inhabitants, that Roderick should no longer be permitted
to violate the received rules of decorum, by obtruding his own
bosom-serpent to the public gaze, and dragging those of decent
people from their lurking-places.

Accordingly, his
relatives interfered, and placed him in a
private asylum for the insane. When the news was noised abroad, it was
observed that many persons walked the streets with freer countenances,
and covered their breasts less carefully with their hands.

His confinement,
however, although it contributed not a little to
the peace of the town, operated unfavorably upon Roderick himself.
In solitude, his melancholy grew more black and sullen. He spent whole
days--indeed, it was his sole occupation--in communing with the
serpent. A conversation was sustained, in which, as it seemed, the
hidden monster bore a part, though unintelligibly to the listeners,
and inaudible, except in a hiss. Singular as it may appear, the
sufferer had now contracted a sort of affection for his tormentor;
mingled, however, with the intensest loathing and horror. Nor were
such discordant emotions incompatible;
each, on the contrary, imparted
strength and poignancy to its opposite. Horrible love--horrible
antipathy--embracing one another in his bosom, and both
concentrating themselves upon a being that had crept into his
vitals, or been engendered there, and which was nourished with his
food, and lived upon his life, and was as intimate with him as his own
heart, and yet was the foulest of all created things! But not the less
was it the true type of a morbid nature.

Sometimes, in
his moments of rage and bitter hatred against the
snake and himself, Roderick determined to be the death of him, even at
the expense of his own life. Once he attempted it by starvation.
But, while the wretched man was on the point of famishing, the monster
seemed to feed upon his heart, and to thrive and wax gamesome, as if
it were his sweetest and most congenial diet. Then he privily took a
dose of active poison, imagining that it would not fail to kill either
himself, or the devil that possessed him, or both together. Another
mistake; for if Roderick had not yet been destroyed by his own
poisoned heart, nor the snake by gnawing it, they had little to fear
from arsenic or corrosive sublimate. Indeed, the venomous pest
appeared to operate as an antidote against all other poisons. The
physicians tried to suffocate the fiend with tobacco-smoke. He
breathed it as freely as if it were his native atmosphere. Again, they
drugged their patient with opium, and drenched him with intoxicating
liquors, hoping that the snake might thus be reduced to stupor, and
perhaps be ejected from the stomach. They succeeded in rendering
Roderick insensible; but, placing their hands upon his breast, they
were inexpressibly horror-stricken to feel the monster wriggling,
twining, and darting to and fro, within his narrow limits, evidently
enlivened by the opium or alcohol, and incited to unusual feats of
activity. Thenceforth, they gave up all attempts at cure or
palliation. The doomed sufferer submitted to his fate,
resumed his
former loathsome affection for the bosom-fiend, and spent whole
miserable days before a looking-glass, with his mouth wide open,
watching, in hope and horror, to catch a glimpse of the snake's
head, far down within his throat. It is supposed that he succeeded;
for the attendants once heard a frenzied shout, and rushing into the
room, found Roderick lifeless upon the floor.

He was
kept but little longer under restraint. After minute
investigation, the medical directors of the asylum decided that his
mental disease did not amount to insanity, nor would warrant his
confinement; especially as its influence upon his spirits was
unfavorable, and might produce the evil which it was meant to
remedy. His eccentricities were doubtless great--he had habitually
violated many of the customs and prejudices of society; but the
world was not, without surer ground, entitled to treat him as a
madman. On this decision of such competent authority, Roderick was
released, and had returned to his native city, the very day before his
encounter with George Herkimer.

As soon
as possible after learning these particulars, the sculptor,
together with a sad and tremulous companion, sought Elliston at his
own house. It was a large, sombre edifice of wood, with pilasters
and a balcony, and was divided from one of the principal streets by
a terrace of three elevations, which was ascended by successive
flights of stone steps. Some immense old elms almost concealed the
front of the mansion. This spacious and once magnificent
family-residence was built by a grandee of the race, early in the past
century; at which epoch, land being of small comparative value, the
garden and other grounds had formed quite an extensive domain.
Although a portion of the ancestral heritage had been alienated, there
was still a shadowy enclosure in the rear of the mansion, where a
student, or a dreamer, or a man of stricken heart, might lie all day
upon the grass, amid
the solitude of murmuring boughs, and forget that
a city had grown up around him.

Into this
retirement, the sculptor and his companion were ushered
by Scipio, the old black servant, whose wrinkled visage grew almost
sunny with intelligence and joy, as he paid his humble greetings to
one of the two visitors.

"Remain in
the arbor, whispered the sculptor to the figure that
leaned upon his arm, "you will know whether, and when, to make your
appearance."

Roderick was
reclining on the margin of a fountain, which gushed
into the fleckered sunshine with the same clear sparkle, and the
same voice of airy quietude, as when trees of primeval growth flung
their shadows across its bosom. How strange is the life of a fountain,
born at every moment, yet of an age coeval with the rocks, and far
surpassing the venerable antiquity of a forest!

"You are
come! I have expected you," said Elliston, when he
became aware of the sculptor's presence.

His manner
was very different from that of the preceding day--quiet,
courteous, and, as Herkimer thought, watchful both over his
guest and himself. This unnatural restraint was almost the only
trait that betokened anything amiss. He had just thrown a book upon
the grass, where it lay half opened, thus disclosing itself to be a
natural history of the serpent-tribe, illustrated by life-like plates.
Near it lay that bulky volume, the Ductor Dubitantium of Jeremy
Taylor, full of cases of conscience, and in which most men,
possessed of a conscience, may find something applicable to their
purpose.

"You see,"
observed Elliston, pointing to the book of serpents,
while a smile gleamed upon his lips, "I am making an effort to
become better acquainted with my bosom-friend. But I find nothing
satisfactory in this volume. If I mistake
not, he will prove to be sui
generis, and akin to no other reptile in creation."

"My sable
friend, Scipio, has a story," replied Roderick, "of a
snake that had lurked in this fountain--pure and innocent as it
looks--ever since it was known to the first settlers. This
insinuating personage once crept into the vitals of my
great-grandfather, and dwelt there many years, tormenting the old
gentleman beyond mortal endurance. In short, it is a family
peculiarity. But, to tell you the truth, I have no faith in this
idea of the snake's being an heir-loom. He is my own snake, and no
man's else."

"Oh! there
is poisonous stuff in any man's heart, sufficient to
generate a brood of serpents," said Elliston, with a hollow laugh.
"You should have heard my homilies to the good townspeople.
Positively, I deem myself fortunate in having bred but a single
serpent. You, however, have none in your bosom, and therefore cannot
sympathize with the rest of the world. It gnaws me! It gnaws me!"

With this
exclamation, Roderick lost his self-control and threw
himself upon the grass, testifying his agony by intricate writhings,
in which Herkimer could not but fancy a resemblance to the motions
of a snake. Then, likewise, was heard that frightful hiss, which often
ran through the sufferer's speech, and crept between the words and
syllables, without interrupting their succession.

"This is
awful indeed!" exclaimed the sculptor--"an awful
infliction, whether it be actual or imaginary! Tell me, Roderick
Elliston, is there any remedy for this loathsome evil?"

"Yes, but
an impossible one," muttered Roderick, as he lay
wallowing with his face in the grass. "Could I, for one instant,
forget myself, the serpent might not abide within me.
It is my
diseased self-contemplation that has engendered and nourished him!"

Rosina had
emerged from the arbor, and was bending over him, with
the shadow of his anguish reflected in her countenance, yet so mingled
with hope and unselfish love, that all anguish seemed but an earthly
shadow and a dream. She touched Roderick with her hand. A tremor
shivered through his frame. At that moment, if report be
trustworthy, the sculptor beheld a waving motion through the grass,
and heard a tinkling sound, as if something had plunged into the
fountain. Be the truth as it might, it is certain that Roderick
Elliston sat up, like a man renewed, restored to his right mind, and
rescued from the fiend, which had so miserably overcome him in the
battle-field of his own breast.

"Rosina!" cried
he, in broken and passionate tones, but with
nothing of the wild wail that had haunted his voice so long. "Forgive!
Forgive!"

"The punishment
has been severe," observed the sculptor. "Even
justice might now forgive--how much more a woman's tenderness!
Roderick Elliston, whether the serpent was a physical reptile, or
whether the morbidness of your nature suggested that symbol to your
fancy, the moral of the story is not the less true and strong. A
tremendous Egotism--manifesting itself, in your case, in the form of
jealousy--is as fearful a fiend as ever stole into the human heart.
Can a breast, where it has dwelt so long, be purified?"

"Oh, yes!"
said Rosina, with a heavenly smile. "The serpent was but
a dark fantasy, and what it typified was as shadowy as itself. The
past, dismal as it seems, shall fling no gloom upon the future. To
give it its due importance, we must think of it but as an anecdote
in our Eternity!"

------
The physical fact, to which it is here attempted to give a moral
signification, has been known to occur in more than one instance.
[author's footnote to title]